


covalent bonds

by abcooper



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:15:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abcooper/pseuds/abcooper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma Simmons learned how to stand alone, but that doesn't mean she ever wanted to</p>
            </blockquote>





	covalent bonds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thinkatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinkatory/gifts).



> Merry Christmas, dear, I don't know if this is quite what you had in mind, but I hope you like it!

Jemma Simmons was 12 the first time it occurred to her that she was lonely. It happened like this:  
  
She came home from school in tears. Her 7th grade science teacher, Mr. Wilmont, had spent their lesson talking about the bernoulli principle, only he had gotten it wrong, and Jemma had raised her hand.  
  
"Yes, what is it?" Mr. Wilmont asked, voice already impatient. He was sick of her, Jemma knew that, knew that no one else was constantly questioning the details of his lectures.  
  
"It's only… well, that's not quite right." she had started, her voice small, and the impatience seemed to erupt out of him.  
  
"What isn't right, Jemma?" he asked, not even bothering to hide the exasperation in his voice. Some of the other kids in her class snickered, it was like an inside joke between him and them - that Jemma Simmons, she never shuts up, let's bond over how annoying she is.   
  
"Well, that's not - I mean, you can't create lift in a 3-dimensional situation without deflecting air downwards -" she started to say. Mr Wilmont rolled his eyes.  
  
"Jemma, do you have your textbook with you?"  
  
"Yes."   
  
"I want you to turn to page…" he flipped through his own book. "191."   
  
She did. The book was wrong too, she saw, but momentary indignation was overshadowed by the triumphant sneer on Mr. Wilmont's face, and the miserable foreknowledge that she was about to be humiliated.  
  
"As you can see, Ms. Simmons, the book agrees with me on the matter. Are you satisfied? May we continue the lesson?" he sneered at her, while her classmates giggled into their beige grafitti'ed desks. Everything was beige, the walls were beige and the desks, and the information and the personalities were a horrid beige color too, weren't they, and Jemma could practically see that stupid ignorant blandness hovering in the air, threatening to consume her, and she hated it all, felt like the hatred in her was enough to boil out of her and drown them, only it wasn't, was it. She was just a 12 year old girl and she was trapped in the beige reality of public middle school, too weak and pathetic to handle it.  
  
She opened her mouth to make one last appeal, because she was right, and the unabridged Wright Brother's journal, which she had read 4 months ago for fun over the summer break, began pouring out of her mouth in a continuous quote that she couldn't quite rein in. She got about 2 and a half pages out, shouting them at the end over Mr Wilmont's reprimands and her classmates' disbelieving laughter, and then her vision had blinked without her eyelids' permission, and she'd suddenly been on the ground instead of standing up, gasping in the breaths she'd forgotten to take.  
  
Mr. Wilmont sent her to the nurse's office first, and the dean's office second. She came home with two notes for her parents to sign, and tears streaming down her face.  
  
Neither of her parents were home. Jemma's father would be at work until 5pm, middle manager in an office building downtown. Her mother worked afternoons in a daycare to bring in a little extra cash. Ilene Simmons was so good with children.  
  
Jemma pictured her coming home flushed with joy, like she always did. She would regale them at dinner with boring stories about the toddlers she worked with, about how one of them had given her a paint-smeared hug and left handprints down her back, and luckily the stuff they used was so washable you could use it as your laundry detergent. Jemma and her father would laugh politely.  
  
Jemma had never really gotten paint-smeared as a toddler. Or maybe she had, she didn't know. All her memories of herself seemed extrapolated backwards from the reality of an awkward, solemn, gawky 12 year old who knew a lot of facts and didn't like to be outdoors. She'd taught herself to read by about 3. When she was 4 she'd had a phase where she liked reading aloud to her parents. When they'd noticed that she could "read" them whole chapter books from memory without looking at the pages, they'd taken her in for testing somewhere.  
  
 She thought maybe she didn't need her mom quite enough, that maybe her mom was secretly a little disappointed about that. They exchanged polite smiles instead of hugs, never had screaming fights.  Ilene bought her all the advanced science books she could want, and let her do as she pleased. It wasn't quite what she wanted from them, in a way that Jemma never could have explained without feeling like ungrateful scum. She could never bring herself to misbehave, to break any rules. She was a guest in her parents' lives, there was an obligation to courtesy.  
  
There would be a calm discussion when Jemma asked Ilene to sign the dean's note. By unspoken agreement, it would be quiet enough that Jemma's father in his study never even had to hear it. He and Ilene would discuss it later, quietly when they thought she was asleep, but that would be the sole connecting point, Jemma wouldn't talk about it with him.  
  
Her mom would say, "Jemma, what happened? It's not like you to lose your temper." Or maybe she'd say, "do you think you were too tired, dear?"  
  
"It's not that I was tired or angry." Jemma would explain. "It's just that he was wrong."  
  
"Why does it matter?" would be the next question, and she would never ever be able to answer it in a way that satisfactorily explained the screaming in her soul. It mattered because he was wrong, because information mattered in and of itself, because everything mattered if you paid any attention at all.   
  
The thought of it all made her sick with dread. She lay on her bed and let hot tears run down her face as she confronted the thought that had been banging guiltily around her skull for longer than she wanted to admit - "no one understands. No one understands anything."  
  
She forged her parents' signatures on the form. She memorized the next four pages of An Encyclopedia of Nobel Prize Winners, until she was feeling calm again. And she went down to dinner dry-eyed, and laughed politely at her mother's stories.  
  
**  
  
Jemma Simmons was 19 years old when she received her first phD - biochemistry from MIT. It happened like this:  
  
There was a graduation ceremony; she assured her parents they needn't attend, that she would rather they skip the cost of the plane tickets and treat her to a congratulatory dinner next time she was in town instead.  
  
She walked down the aisle, through the sea of cardinal and grey, and she was secretly grateful to know they weren't in the crowd. It wasn't for them, it wasn't for anyone but her. If you were alone, you could at least find strength in your solitude.  
  
She hummed with it - through the ceremony, through the reception. It was a triumphant sense of distance that she would have been hard-pressed to explain. She had wondered if she could succeed, had never been entirely sure of it, and now she had  the answer. It was worth knowing, surely. Jemma Simmons was strong enough to stand alone.  
  
The thing was though, there weren't any closing credits after the ceremony. It had been her goal since she was 14 years old, sitting in the dean's office in the local high school, negotiating her diploma on one year of required classes and 18 high scores on AP exams, but things weren't finished just because her goal was met. Around her, classmates - most of then at least a decade older than her -  met up with parents or loved ones, glowing with excitement. Slowly but surely the crown melted away  
  
She ended up going for a coffee in a crappy little diner, still wearing her graduation gown, because she didn't know what to do next.  
  
"What can I get you, hon?" asked the waitress, a middle-aged woman with an atrocious dye job.  
  
"I'd like a pot of coffee and a slice of blueberry pie, please." Jemma answered politely, and then burst into noisy tears.  
  
"I'll make it the biggest slice of pie that can fit on the plate." the waitress promised her, with a fluttery sort of hand gesture that looked like it was meant as comfort, before she retreated and left Jemma to regain control.  
  
She wasn't sure why she was crying even, but it could not be checked, pouring out of her in loud humiliating heaves of emotion.   
  
"Is the pie here any good?" came a mild voice, and Jemma peered through wet eyelashes to see a middle-aged man with a receding hairline slip into the booth across from her.  
  
Her first thought was that he was a well-intentioned fellow diner hoping to comfort her, and she was feeling so low that she was actually a bit grateful, even through the burn of unbearable humiliation. That was what made her answer, albeit in a wobbly voice, "the blueberry is good, they get it from a local bakery - avoid the lemon meringue though."  
  
"Thanks." he responded, still very mild, appearing to take no notice of her disheveled state. The waitress came back with a pot of coffee and he smiled up at her, a close-lipped expression that made his face go sort of unattractively monochrome. "I'll take a slice of blueberry pie please."  
  
The waitress left and awkward silence fell, interrupted only by the occasional hiccuping noise that Jemma couldn't keep from slipping out. They sat quietly until their pie arrived a moment later, and the man dug in, humming appreciatively around his first bite. Jemma poked at her own with a fork, unable to face a bite, but appreciating the social lubricant of having something to concentrate on besides her strange companion and inexplicable feelings.  
  
Finally, the man put his fork down and smiled directly at her. "Ms Simmons, I apologize for my awkward timing. My name is Phil Coulson. I work for an agency called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. I'm here because my organization is very interested in your research on neurotoxins that effect the memory regions of the brain."  
  
**  
  
Jemma wasn’t sure what she’d expected from her first day of training by a secret government agency, but the small meeting room in the middlingly impressive office building in downtown Manhattan came as both a relief and a letdown. Eight other scientists milled around awkwardly, not quite managing small talk with each other. As usual, most of them were older than her by at least a decade, some of them by two or three, but there was one boy who looked, if anything, even younger than she was. He had curled blonde hair in an unflattering cut, framing a baby face, and he was sitting awkwardly at the back of the room away from everyone else, with a pair of headphones in his ears and a notebook in his hand, looking extremely awkward.  
An unprecedented sense of fellow-feeling, interesting for its novelty value, prompted Jemma to sit next to him, peering as subtly as she knew how at the notebook in his hand - it was covered in equations, but they were clearly more like doodles than actual work, some of them running sideways across the page, others scribbled messily in the margins. Next to one was a crude drawing of a robot, staring at the equation with with an expression of astonished alarm.  
  
She turned her startled laugh into a cough, and at the sound the boy jumped, apparently not having noticed her presence until just then. She couldn’t help laughing at him a bit more, and he pulled the headphones out of his ears, grinning sheepishly at her.  
  
“Hullo. Leo Fitz.” he introduced himself, pulling back a bit to hold his hand out at an awkward angle in the too-close seats.  
  
“Jemma Simmons, nice to meet you.” she replied, shaking it. “I haven’t a clue what to expect from this, do you? I mean - getting approached by secret government spies over pie wasn’t what I expected from my graduation, I’m still not convinced that it isn’t a practical joke.”  
  
“Ah, you’re new then?” He grinned at her. “They approached me a few years ago. They paid for my phD, so if it’s a practical joke it’s a hell of an expensive one. I like to think they wouldn’t have paid for all that just to shoot me in an alley-way either, though everyone I’ve met so far sort of looks like they could if they wanted to.”  
  
Privately, Jemma didn’t think that Mr. Coulson had looked like he could do much besides staple forms together, but maybe he was the exception. “What did you study?” she asked instead of saying so. “Theoretical physics?”   
  
“Physical engineering.” he answered, ducking his head sheepishly at her expression of surprise. “Yeah, I know, but I get bored if they don’t let me think about actually making things.”  
  
The conversation was interrupted as another man entered the room and cleared his throat to get their attention. Balding and in little round glasses, he didn’t look much like he could kill anyone either. So far, secret agencies weren’t as exciting as she’d hoped.  
  
“Good morning ladies and gentleman, and welcome to SHIELD. My name is Agent Sitwell, I’m going to spend awhile going over our organizations policies and goals in some general terms. If we sound like somebody you could work with, you’ll be given a few nondisclosure forms to sign, and then we can get down to the more specific details of what you’ve been recruited for.”  
  
Sitwell’s speech was mostly designed to convince them all that SHIELD wasn’t evil, but of course there wasn’t any proof of that. The whole thing seemed, potentially, a little evil. But it sounded exciting too.  
  
And her eyes kept shifting over to the boy next to her... Leo Fitz. He looked relaxed, a little bored. He said he’d known about SHIELD for years, he must have heard all this before, probably knew even more than Sitwell was saying. They wouldn’t have paid his tuition without securing his agreement to work for them. It was... reassuring, that they’d been able to say something to convince Fitz that they were alright. She’d only known him a moment, but she felt like anything that could convince him could probably convince her too. That was new. She’d never quite..... connected with someone before. It was nice.  
  
Afterwards, Sitwell handed out thick packets of forms for them to read, and left them to it. The other scientists were muttering, looking skeptical, reading through the forms with dubious looks on their faces.  
  
Fitz didn’t even bother to read his before he started signing in all the appropriate places. Jemma threw caution to the wind and did the same.


End file.
